Immediately after the US government announced it had pulled a $34m plug on worldwide family planning services, the executive director of the United Nations population fund (UNFPA) gave this stark assessment: "Women and children will die because of this decision."

The lost funding, which accounts for 13% of UNFPA's global budget, would have prevented 2m unwanted pregnancies and the deaths of 77,000 children, the agency said.

The US president, George Bush, mouthed concern that US funds may be used to perform forced abortions on women in China, despite his own fact-finding mission assuring him that was not the case.

Indeed, money that the US gives to UNFPA has in the past gone into a separate account, one that did not fund projects in China at all, to respect the perfectly legitimate US concerns about coerced abortions. The same arrangement was on offer this year.

However China figures in the Bush administration decision only as a scapegoat. Unable to support an outright ban on abortion at home for fear of a wider political backlash, the president is free to dent the reproductive health programmes of women in developing nations who have no access to the US ballot box. The edifying effect on rightwing supporters is the same.

For the women of China, the insult is doubled: they have been denied access to essential healthcare and support, and at the same time been cited as the reason for its withdrawal. No doubt they all feel greatly protected by the US government's tough stance on human rights abuses in China, a policy also much evident in the US's heavy presence in China's export zones.

A US pro-choice group, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, estimated that the withdrawal of UNFPA funds would result, ironically, in an estimated 1m abortions as a result of 3m unplanned pregnancies.

Even taking the source into account, the obvious effect of snatching away birth control programmes is increased pregnancy, and at least some of those women will choose abortion. In China they may have no choice in the matter. No birth control means no way to avoid abortions. I can almost hear Chinese women cheering the US "pro-life" lobby.

The decision also has been made just weeks after the US attended the international Aids summit in Barcelona. In addition to its duties in cutting maternal death and illness, providing women with the opportunity to control their reproduction, and giving medical care to infants and children, UNFPA has provided frontline Aids prevention in 142 countries. Those programmes, too, will be cut.

With this decision the president has proven himself more concerned with making political capital out of abortion than with the lives of women and children in developing nations. He has hit a new low.